LavaBlast Software Inc. is a Canadian startup that builds software for the franchise industry. They’ve developed several easy-to-use software applications that are deployed in retail franchise locations and have integrated these with FranchiseBlast, their centralized management solution.
LavaBlast develops custom software solutions for the franchise industry, spanning self-serve interactive kiosks, point-of-sale systems, and the franchisor & franchisee’s e-commerce web sites. These systems are integrated through a web-based, hosted application, FranchiseBlast. FranchiseBlast allows franchisors and franchisees to collaborate. For example, they can change store pricing, update their respective web sites, view sales reports, manage leads and frequent buyer programs, and so on.
LavaBlast already has about half-a-dozen customers, all small or medium sized franchises. What is so interesting about this company is that one of the co-founders wrote software applications to help put him through college. One of his customers was a franchise. This led him to found the company to serve the unmet need. The other interesting thing about this company is their integration of kiosks, point-of-sale systems and e-commerce enabled web sites, allowing their solutions to scale to a large customer-set.
One of LavaBlast’s key claims to fame is that because they understand the needs of small and medium-sized franchises, their software is customizable to limit the feature set. This makes it easy-to-use, in turn lowering training costs.
LavaBlast runs on Microsoft SQL Server for which the Microsoft C# data access layer is auto-generated by the SubSonic open source project. The web-based applications are built using ASP.net and JQuery.
